At the moment, we sleep in the back bedroom. The other one, the one that is not our study, has been caught between old and new for a few weeks now. Dust-sheets on a pile of furniture in the middle of the room, paint tins lined up neatly against the wall. Beyond that window, the nicotiana is on the brink of blooming; sown from seed back in early lockdown. I’m not sure either of us thought it would flower two miles away.
So here, with a radiator as a headboard, we wake to views of the garden. We await curtains, and so catch glimmers of the light instead. Streetlamp sycamore silhouette. This landscape is new to me. The furthest north, south of the river, that I have lived. To cycle into the city feels like a heartbeat. After a near-decade of living among London’s leafier bits, always on the edge of Zone Three, I have landed near noise.
I knew I would miss the birds, often the only thing that interrupted the silence of the Treehouse; the birds and the sound of M’s sleeping breath in the dawn hours that separated us. For the past few weeks I have not heard them, at all. Quietly, while rushing about in the same paint-splattered pink jeans, I have mourned their absence. We hear planes overhead and the screech of motorbikes, the surreal lilt of an accordion being played across the way, but no birdsong.
This morning I woke at fiveish. Lay there, on sleepily plumped pillows, willing my brain to hush. As my limbs twitched, the fluting song of a wren drifted through the open window. So clear, so loud that even my mind chatter stilled. The sky outside was weak and milky; a baby boy blue.
I didn’t get back to sleep. There are few mornings left when I will wake early enough to see daybreak change the colour of the sky. Instead I tried to tune in. New places take practice, learning the muscle memory required by a different kitchen, a set of stairs. And my ears need it too. Recently, I spoke to an ornithologist who has given 20 years of his life to studying an owl so elusive that even the locals couldn’t identify its cry. For certain frequencies, we need to make an effort.
And so I kept hearing them - nothing much that I could identify beyond a crow, but a small chorus nonetheless. Sounds that rushed me back to my childhood.
I resolved to make a garden that would bring the birds back. I want to give them reason to fly beneath the planes. At the moment, some come and scavenge over the bare beds, presumably for the seeds I build into my sowing (one for the soil, one for the birds, one for the wind), but this time next year I hope to give them swaying, crisping seedheads. A smorgasboard of choice. Here, near this bustling cut-through, this cusp of town, I will make an unlikely oasis.
